Junk Food @ MindSay

Dixie currently feels:

 Depressed

 

(Well what else is new...?)

 

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Yesterday was a bank holiday Monday, so I spent the day at Adam's house.

 

We played a few songs on Guitar Hero III co-op, and got him a couple of groupie points.

Then he burnt me Parappa The Rapper, and I tried it out, did the first few levels, and got the "U Rappin' Cool!" rank on level 1.

 

When I got home though, I kept failing level 1.

Which was annoying...

Almost as annoying as the fact that memory card slot 1 is broken on my chipped Playstation, so I'll never be able to save PTR, because it will only save to slot 1.

 

Anyway though.

We sat around drinking Cherry Coke, eating Oreos and sweets - milk bottles and cherry cola bottles - then crisps and salted peanuts.

 

Adam then suggested he get out the old PS1 and we play Resident Evil 3.

Of course, he played it, I watched and offered my hints. :)

 

It was great fun actually.

 

The weird thing was though, every time I seemed to speak - something would happen.

And this happened like five times - every time I started talking, either zombies would jump out of cars, dogs would jump out of windows, or Nemesis would burst out of a door.

 

 

 

Today's been shit though.

 

It's weird though - I don't think I've done ANY schoolwork today.

 

- OMFG THERE'S A SPIDER ON THE WALL BEHIND MY MONITOR...

 

 

...But yes.

Umm...

 

Lesson 1 - IT, exam prep, I'm not doing the exam again, I had nothing to do, I went on FPC.com.

Lesson 2 - English, revision, I didn't do a lot, just listened and read.

Lesson 3 - Science, Cowley just talked us through our coursework.

Lesson 4 - Maths, Wilson wasn't even there, we were down in humanities 2, and Miraan, Amanda and I just played hangman for like the whole hour.

Lesson 5 - Media studies, down the CLC, Sam and I just sat there playing hangman on the PC, because we can't really do an awful lot on our project.

 

 

Though, I felt depressed all day.

Just listening to a certain set of people who used to be friends with me until they met each other - talking and laughing down the aisle next to me.

So I cut myself a little bit.

 

At dinnertime, I did my left, and I did my right after school.

 

Which was a bad time to do it, because as Mrs Mac was talking to me, she took me by the right wrist - as she often does when she talks to people - but she pressed her fingers right into the fresh cuts, and it KANED.

So I just stood there wincing, trying to keep silence, despite how much it hurt.

 

Tomorrow I have to go and see those people, and I'm not looking forward.

At least mother isn't coming.

 

Sigh...

Check out this story from the New York Times (free registration required) concerning the move by the New York City Council to change the City zoning laws in order to limit the number of fast food restauarants that could set up shop in the City. The proposal's sponsor, Joel Rivera, got the idea from the town of Calistoga, California that

banned McDonald’s and other fast-food chains to preserve the uniqueness and small-town charm of the city’s commercial areas. Mr. Rivera wants to restrict them for another reason: to fight chronic obesity, particularly in poor neighborhoods. About 1 in 5 New Yorkers is obese, according to the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Behold our Brave New World: Junk food and overconsumption are the new vices from which the American people must be protected. Are parental consent laws on the horizon? Will little Jimmy need to be accompanied by an adult to get that Big Mac or Happy Meal?

 

On a side ntoe, this story is a great illustration of the differences between Downstate and Upstate New York.  No municipality in Upstate New York (except maybe Ithaca, but that's a whole other story) would ever take a proposal like this seriously.  Don't mess with our junk food if you know what's good for you.

Cruise food taste boring, we jumped into the first Macdonald we saw as soon as we berthed. Every country's Macdonald's tastes different, I just had to try their soft serve (soft ice-cream). As I happily licked my cone, my cousin Johnny snared at my ear:"you r eating plastic!" So? who cares? Everyone is eating this, and if plastic can taste this good, I'll eat it! Johnny is an organic health food freak, he's been eating like a monk. So be it! Plastic taste good! There was a game on the deck, like the pepsi and coke marketing tasting thing. But we had to guess what we are drinking. I just realised that pepsi actually taste better!

I'm 5'10, under 8% body fat, and I'm prepared to divulge my secrets. To the highest bidder. Well, to anybody on Mindsay, really.

I'm not so sure it's a secret so much as a physiological-psychological (ever seen THOSE two words juxtaposed with a hyphen?) connection that has been made in my grocery-buying mind over time. Here's how it works. I train rather seriously every day for a sport that demands about the same amount of food intake by itself as my very existance. As I went down the aisles of the grocery store today, I looked at a box of Oreos and was repulsed. Whoa, that's weird. I can and have eaten an entire box of Oreos in one sitting. My body knows this. It also knows that the sugar in cookies doesn't supply it with enough fuel to push a boat across water once I start training the energy systems directly. It's fine if I'm just doing easy 8-10 milers, but the moment I start pushing the limits, my body starts demanding the right kinds of fuel. A list from today follows, but I'll explain a bit of my [limited] understanding on nutrition first.

Now normally, I can live on whatever junk food I happen to find in my cabinet. I can eat pretty much anything, and assuming I only consume as many calories as I expend studying, my bodyweight will not fluctuate. In the winter of curling up under a blanket trying to demystify quantum mechanics, that means food consumption is pretty minimal. This applies to everybody in principle.* If the body's health demands are minimal, such as required by curling up under blankets, any old food will do and bodyweight will not fluctuate, provided you eat small enough portions. Now the catch is that the body doesn't get all the nutrients it needs to do healthy things besides controlling its weight. When that happens, it asks for more food in order to acquire those nutrients. If you feed it more of same, it still doesn't have enough of what it needs. It packs the extras away in fat cells and asks for more, hoping to get something useful.

Okay, so I need to pick that apart. First, the astrisk (*) on portions. How much food are we talking here? According to the side of the Cheez-it box I have beside me, 27 of those little square crackers come packed with 160 kCal of energy. Those are the same things nonscientists call "calories," by the way. Quick freshman physics calculation here. 1.0 kCal = 4,186 Joules of energy. That's 24,800 Joules of energy for one cracker. Assuming that you can do a bench press over a distance of 80cm, the cracker has enough energy in it to exert over that distance 31,000 Newtons of force. On earth at sea level, that comes to 3160 kg, or 7000 pounds. That's right. ONE Cheez-it can bench press three and a half tons. (Did I do that right? I haven't done problems with numbers in so long I might have dropped a decimal point somewhere.) Okay, so our bodies aren't so efficient. As I understand it, those numbers on the box are calculated by lighting the Cheez-it on fire and seeing how hot it gets. Standard laboratory technique, but kind of useless for humans. The point is, a very little bit of food goes a long way.

Now to the second point. I have nothing to explain because I am not a nutritionist, but quality of food matters far more than quantity. The body can make do with very small portions as long as it's getting an efficient mixture. Would you start putting crazy chemicals into the gas tank of your car? No. Cars run on a certain mixture of gas and a few other additives, and if you do something else, you're just going to make it inefficient. The same goes for the body. Its nutritional needs are more complicated because it needs more specific nutrients than a car, but the principle is the same. My general rule of thumb is to be mindful of sugar content. If it has a lot of sugar, it's likely not going to be a very efficient fuel. That said, I do eat rich sweets. Now and then. Not as a primary fuel source.

So excerpts from my grocery receipt: (I already have quite a few things like meat and veggies purchased from a better store)

• Yogurt (Stonyfield Farm: peach, raspberry, and key lime)
• Salad makings
• Whole grain bread- the processed breads repulsed me today even though I usually enjoy PB&J on potato bread. Jelly is mostly sugar. Great to wake you up at lunch, but it only lasts a couple of hours.
• A pint of vanilla ice cream. Mom sent me the ingredients for my birthday "cake" although I haven't made it yet. It goes best with ice cream.
• Half-and-half for coffee
• 2% milk. My body didn't make any statement on this. I sometimes like whole milk, but sometimes milk in general gets in the way of training if practices are frequent.
• Rasin bran
• Peanut butter and cran-apple jelly- even though it did not look appetizing, it's always good to have PB&J around. It's more healthy and certainly more filling than a number of other things.
• Italian dressing
• White cheddar cheese block
• Cheez-its mentioned above- these were in lieu of the Oreos. I needed some sort of junk food!
• Triscuits
• Spanish rice
• Great Northern beans (No, mother, I still don't like beans. But they looked substantial, so I'll make them and see if I can strike a stalemate between us.)
• Pasta and sauce
• Sugar (For coffee mostly, although I'm sure somebody somewhere has upended a box of it into their mouth. Probably on a dare.)
• Pink lady apples. Because I already ran out of fruit.

Not on the list anywhere: frozen dinners, processed vegetables, cookies (yummm), etc. I'm not sure where I heard the advice, but at a good supermarket, you should be able to fill most of your cart by going around the edges without delving into the center section of aisles. For the most part, I think it's true. Whoever told me that was observant.

Bed time. Because sleep is also a friend of training.

A
p.s. suggested tags have been adopted